Chapter 9 - The Edge of the Void
The wind at the cliff edge was deafening, roaring like a jet engine as it swept up from the icy basin below.
Marcus stood three feet from the drop.
He was wearing an oversized, dirt-stained army fatigue jacket, his hair long, wild, and matted with snow. His face was gaunt, his cheekbones sharp, his eyes sunken and burning with a manic, unpredictable fever. In his right hand, he held a heavy steel crowbar.
Tessa stood beside him.
Her hands were bound behind her back with thick yellow nylon rope. She was wearing her thin navy coat—the same coat she had worn four years ago during her interview—and her silver-framed glasses were gone, leaving her pale grey eyes wide, unprotected, and fixed entirely on me as I stepped out of the dark.
"Julian!" Marcus screamed over the wind, a terrifying, hysterical laugh tearing from his throat. "The great Julian Vance! The King of Beacon Hill! You actually came!"
"Marcus," I said, taking two slow, deliberate steps forward, keeping my hands visible, spread wide at my sides. "Let her go. This is between you and me."
"Between you and me?" Marcus mocked, taking a step toward me, brandishing the crowbar. "There is no 'you and me,' Julian! You killed 'you and me' twelve years ago when you let them drag me away in handcuffs while you sat in your air-conditioned office counting your bonuses!"
"I was wrong, Marcus," I said, the words torn from my throat by the wind. "I was wrong about everything. I should have helped you. I should have fought for you."
Marcus stopped. He blinked, a flicker of confusion crossing his wild, gaunt face, as if he had prepared for a hundred different arguments from me, but not an admission of guilt.
"Don't lie to me!" he shrieked, his voice cracking with rage. "You don't care about me! You never cared about anyone! You didn't care about Arthur Callaway, you didn't care about Mom, and you don't care about this girl!"
"She knows, Marcus," I said softly, taking another step forward.
"Knows what?"
I looked past Marcus, directly into Tessa's grey eyes.
"She knows that Arthur Callaway didn't steal that thirty million dollars," I said, my voice dropping into a steady, absolute line of truth. "She knows that you took it, Marcus. And she knows that I covered it up by sacrificing her father to the federal prosecutors."
The wind seemed to die down for a single, freezing second.
Tessa didn't scream. She didn't gasp. She simply stood in the blowing snow, her dark hair whipping across her face, looking at me with an expression of profound, crushing sorrow.
Marcus stared at me, his mouth open, the crowbar trembling in his hand.
"You knew?" Marcus whispered, his voice suddenly sounding tiny, like the voice of the frightened teenager he had once been. "You knew it was me?"
"I found your signature on the Cayman transfers three weeks before the federal raid," I said, my chest aching with an unbearable weight. "I knew you were facing thirty years in a federal penitentiary. I knew you wouldn't survive it. So when the prosecutors demanded a head, I gave them Arthur. He was old, he was wealthy, and I thought... God forgive me, Marcus... I thought he could handle it better than you."
"He hanged himself, Julian!" Marcus screamed, tears streaming down his gaunt, frost-bitten cheeks. "He hanged himself in a six-by-eight cell because of your cover-up!"
"I know," I said, taking another step forward, until I was standing only five feet from the edge of the cliff. "I know he did. And I spent twenty years trying to build an empire high enough to keep me from looking down at his grave."
I turned my head and looked directly at Tessa.
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"She didn't come to my house to kill me, Marcus," I whispered. "She came to see if the man who traded her father's life for his brother's freedom had built anything worth having."
Tessa closed her eyes, a single tear freezing on her cheek as she bowed her head in the snow.
